HP Blogger Deletes Another Customer Comment

A few days ago I wrote about HP’s censoring, and then uncensoring, of a comment to its blog. The removal of the comment caused a furore and led to the HP blogger, David Gee, apologising and acknowledging the good learning experience:

This was a good learning experience for us and we strive to maintain honest and open communication with our customers. If we are going to use blogging as a legitimate connection between us and our customers, we need to choose either to be in all the way or out. We choose to be in. We want to hear from you.

Kudos to them, but I couldn’t help noticing they’ve done it again. As I pointed out in the previous post, another customer had posted an even more outspoken comment, as follows:

I think you are a bastard if you delete posts like that. We have freedom of speech in this country and if you dont like it, THAN MOVE!

Wanna know what I think of HP??? I think HP is the worst computer company ever to exist! They lie. I got lied to 5 times over the phone during a series of technical support calls.They told me that if they sent the fixed product to me and it wasnt “really fixed”, that they would issue a refund. But you know what they did? They replaced (and deleted all of my data) the hard drive!! The problem was the internal WIFI card that I did not want to spend $50 buying a new one!

This Country is a democracy, and if you dont like it, than move!

-Casey S Posted by AngryHPCustomer#9999999991 on May 8, 2005 1:09:49 AM PDT

When I wrote the earlier post on Monday, Asian time, that post was still there. Two days on, I’ve looked hard, but I can no longer find it. Seven hours after AngryHPCustomer Casey S posted his comment, David Gee posted this:

Thanks for all the feedback and commentary here, in Slashdot and by Dan Gillmor. There’s a lot of constructive opinion which I for one greatly appreciate, and we’ll try and keep the spam and defamatory entries sidelined so we can focus on the discussion at hand.

I’m guessing Gee judged Casey S’ comments to be defamatory rather than spam. But are they? Well he does call David Gee a bastard, but he does make it conditional on him deleting posts such as the one the post is discussing. So I’m not sure how defamatory that is. Casey S’ post does contain some spelling errors, but it also contains what appears to be some legitimate feedback on HP’s customer service, albeit expressed in insufficient detail for HP to pursue directly.

But there’s a bigger point here. David Gee admitted messing up on the first deletion. That’s good. This second one is more tricky. But blogging, and taking comments, is not just about constructive opinion expressed politely. ‘Honest and open communication’ means just that. It means allowing all sorts to express their views, however poorly they may do so. Offensive comments that have no bearing whatsoever on the subject should be removed; offensive comments that do have some bearing on the discussion should either have their offensive wording removed (offensive being the comments about David Gee’s illegitimacy, not the assessment of HP as ‘the worst company ever to exist’), or the post removed and an explanation as to why put in its place. To do neither, and just remove without ceremony or explanation the post on a topic entitled ‘Taking It On The Chin’, ends up distorting the comment record and making a mistake little different to removing the earlier comment.

To parse David Gee’s subsequent comment more deeply: Lumping ‘spam and defamatory entries’ together is somewhat disingenuous, since it appears to put CaseyS’ comments in the same bucket as comment spam. Which it clearly is not. The word ‘sidelined’ to me sounds like a euphemism for ‘deleted’ or ‘erased’, since I can no longer find any record of CaseyS’ post. To talk about doing this to ‘focus on the discussion at hand’ sounds to me like steering a debate in the direction one wants, which is not what comments on blogs are about. Lastly, I’d suggest that CaseyS’ comments, though distasteful to some and not as coherent or directly relevant as others on the page, do refer to the ‘discussion at hand’, namely censoring blogs. Indeed, by removing the comment, David Gee has made CaseyS’ comments directly relevant to the ‘discussion at hand’.

In short, blog censorship is a tricky business and I’d urge HP not to indulge in it unless it really has to. Removing comment spam and comments that are clearly unrelated to the topic in hand is a no-brainer; they are no use to readers of the blog. But anything else is censorship, however disagreeable it may be to read. Casey S, however badly expressed his comments were, had a point. He is a customer, apparently, with a complaint. He should be heard, and his complaint should be investigated. He should not be erased without an explanation. HP — and other big companies embracing this new medium — have only just begun its learning experience.

(I’m going to send a note to David Gee and ask for his comments, which I’ll post here later.)